The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand (and Why Most Businesses Get It Wrong)

How to harness customer demand to fuel your business growth

Rob Snyder followed all the traditional advice for launching a startup. He did his research, ran experiments, raised millions in venture capital, but his company struggled to get off the ground. It wasn't until he left the standard playbooks behind that he was able to quickly scale to millions of dollars in revenue. Now he's a successful serial entrepreneur whose advice has helped hundreds of business owners get unstuck and start scaling.

In The Power of Pull, Snyder strips business down to one counterintuitive principle: Customer demand is all that matters. When business owners find real demand, they stop pushing their product onto an indifferent market, and instead customers pull the product out of their hands.

Demand first, everything else later

And demand isn't 'people who want our product'. Its' what customers urgently want to accomplish in their own lives - right now. A promotion? Better health? Fulfilling relationships? When your solution fits that priority better than the alternatives, customers buy naturally. If it doesn't, no amount of persuasion or advertising will create traction.

Including the practical PULL framework, showing how to identify genuine demand, and examples from companies like Basecamp, HubSpot and Tesla, this book gives founders a clear path to faster growth - without the guesswork.

Rob Snyder is a serial B2B startup founder and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs. He graduated from Harvard Business School and previously worked at McKinsey & Company where he launched a weekly internal intrapreneurship newsletter that grew to thousands of subscribers. He is also an entrepreneur-in-residence and venture partner for early-stage venture capital funds.

Rob speaks on this topic at Harvard, MIT, and USC; and at startup accelerators like TechStars, On Deck, Food Foundry, and Gener8tor; and even at billion-dollar companies. To date, his presentations have been accessed by hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs. He have been named one of ~10 Fellows at the Harvard Innovation Lab, and was asked to develop and run a startup bootcamp for Harvard entrepreneurs.

Recently named a Top Voice on LinkedIn, Rob lives with his wife and daughter in Brookline, New Hampshire.